I think a lot of the criticisms come from the fact that people went into the movie with a bad taste in their mouth, pretty much determined not to like it from the moment they saw Snyder or Goyer was involved or they saw Superman didn't have red briefs and a spit curl, and pretty much nothing that happened in the film would have come through that filter intact. If Superman fought Zod in a desert, people would complain about Zack Snyder having to make everything brown. I think Reddish Mage sort of addresses this in the sense that fight scenes have happened in Metropolis in the comics and in cartoons that don't get nearly the same level of hate because people are willing to suspend their disbelief and accept that all the innocent bystanders were successfully evacuated or whatever; despite the similarly largely bloodless carnage in Man of Steel, viewers presume a massive body count to justify their ire. The problem isn't that Superman punches people through buildings, really, since that's happened in a lot of media that doesn't get the same reaction or even the same presumed death toll; the problem is that a Superman people decided would be grimdark before the first trailer even finished rolling punched people through buildings, so they decide there's a huge death toll. Basically, it's a reading that is no more supported by the text than it is by various other texts; if it's true about Man of Steel, it's true about the Justice League episode mentioned earlier in the thread.

This isn't to say that there aren't real problems with the film, but that so many of the overwhelmingly negative reactions read as pretty transparent attempts to hate the film. The tornado scene is one good example of this. Nothing Jonathan Kent does is really all that dumb; he leaves Clark to take care of his wife, he manages to get out of the truck in about than twenty seconds, then limps out of it because a car just crushed his leg. Yet, when people complain about the scene, anyone who isn't a total idiot would have broken a car window with their bare hands and crawled out of that (with a car crushing their leg) in like ten seconds, he limps out of the wreckage because his leg "was asleep," and so on. It's not even a matter of Hulk's "tangible details," it's to the point of entirely intangible, largely invented details.

It's fine to not like the movie, or to feel that the movie isn't the representation of Superman you'd like to see, but I think a lot of the "hate" for it just boils down to bad criticism that doesn't hate the film itself so much as preconceived notions of what the film would be, regardless of how supported those criticisms are by the text itself.